A prospective strategy leveraging nanomedicine for cancer therapy: Pouring ferroptosis on apoptosis

As a fundamental process of the programmed cell death, apoptosis has endowed nanomedicine broad horizons to treat tumor. However, apoptosis-resistance elicited by several factors such as de-regulated apoptotic signaling has led to therapeutic failure or recurrence of tumors. Ferroptosis, a fresh identified form of programmed cell death, confers a new modality for killing cancer cells beyond apoptosis. Monotherapy tends to acquire partial tumor regression and results in unsatisfactory therapeutic effects, while combination therapy performs well indicated by numerous clinical applications. Encouraged by the distinct but tied mechanisms of ferroptotic and apoptotic death pathway, synergizing ferroptosis with apoptosis for cancer treatment has drawn abundant attention recently. In this review, we summarize the state of art research progresses in combining ferroptosis with apoptosis for enhanced tumor therapeutic effect in nanomedicine, and provide a potential research focus for the future.